Guest Commentary (4162)

(Photo: Phillip Maiwald)For Christian Zionists and neo-conservatives, the discussion over what to do about Iran is nothing new. If it were up to folks like Michael Evans, Joel Rosenberg and John Bolton, the U.S. would have bombed Iran years ago. These days, however, as the current debate over the Iranian nuclear deal continues going nuclear, conservatives are charging the Obama administration with at best being naive and getting snookered by Iranian negotiators, and at worst, with leading Israelis "to the ovens," and staging a replay (only worse) of Neville Chamberlain's Munich deal with Hitler. Iran can't be trusted is a most commonly heard refrain.

Christian Zionists, who for years have been hankering for the U.S. to exercise a more muscular approach to Iran, are committing tens of millions of dollars to killing the deal. Republicans think they have found the Golden Ticket to finally winning over Jewish voters.

While all the yammering is going on, it is worth stepping back in time to see how we got to where we are with Iran. And for that, there's no better place to turn than to Stephen Kinzer's now twelve-year-old -- but still seminal -- book, All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.

All The Shah's Men describes the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) maiden coup -- the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. The coup's code name was "Operation Ajax."

Chicago probably isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of farming, but the city’s Pullman Park district will soon be home to the largest rooftop greenhouse in the world. Once construction is complete, the behemoth 75,000 square foot green space, built and operated by Gotham Greens, will be larger than a football stadium and even some city blocks.

As Business Insider puts it, “For some perspective on the size of the greenhouse: the average size of a city block in many parts of the US—including Portland, Oregon and Houston, Texas—is 67,600 square feet. An NFL football field is 57,600 square feet. This greenhouse is larger than all of these things.”

According to a Gotham Greens, the greenhouse will produce up to 1 million pounds of sustainably grown, pesticide-free produce annually. The harvest will also be distributed through local retailers, restaurants, farmer’s markets and community groups. Since the greens are grown locally, it eliminates the carbon emissions and miles that food traditionally travels to get to Chicago’s plates.

“This is an exciting opportunity to bring fresh, healthy produce year-round to Pullman, which is underserved for food, and going through an exciting resurgence in economic development,” Gotham Greens CEO Viraj Puri told DNAInfo. The rooftop farm is also expected to hire 40 workers to help grow the produce, the site reported.

Since announcing his 2016 White House bid, Donald Trump has been the central focus of the campaign — by one estimate, he has garnered almost 40 percent of all election coverage on the network newscasts. Clearly, The Donald's attempt to turn 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. into Trump White House has attracted so much attention because the candidate is seen as a Bulworthesque carnival barker who will say anything, no matter how hypocritical, factually unsubstantiated or absurd.

Yet for all the hype he's generated, Trump is not the only presidential hopeful willing to make utterly mind-boggling statements.

Take Hillary Clinton. Earlier this month, she said, "there can be no justification or tolerance for this kind of criminal behavior" that has been seen on Wall Street. She added that "while institutions have paid large fines and in some cases admitted guilt, too often it has seemed that the human beings responsible get off with limited consequences or none at all, even when they have already pocketed the gains." Her campaign echoed the message with an email to supporters lauding Clinton for saying that "when Wall Street executives commit criminal wrongdoing, they deserve to face criminal prosecution."

On July 29, Sanders will address thousands of supporters live via streaming video from a home in Washington, DC. According to his campaign, more than 82,000 people have indicated that they plan to attend one of the more than 3,000 simultaneous local organizing meetings.

“We have a technology available to us that Barack Obama and Howard Dean did not have,” the U.S. senator from Vermont said in an interview with the New York Times‘ First Draft. “And the idea that I can simultaneously be speaking to people located in 1,000 different places is pretty, pretty exciting.” The candidate’s address will be followed by a planning meeting for anyone who wants to stay online and discuss joining his campaign.

“I often make the joke, although it’s not such a joke, that if we can spend half of the time in this country talking about why the middle class is collapsing, as opposed to football or baseball, we would revolutionize what’s going on in America,” Sanders told Vox.

(Photo: EcoWatch)Advocates of “market-based” climate solutions paint pastel pictures reflecting smoothly adjusting macro-economic models. Competitive markets gradually nudged by carbon pricing glide into a low carbon future in a modestly disruptive fashion, much as sulfur pollution from power plants was scaled back in the 1990’s.

But commodity markets for oil and gas don’t work that way. These real markets are poised to savagely strand assets, upset expectations, overturn long established livelihoods and leave a trail of wreckage behind them—unless climate advocates start owning the fruits of their own success and preparing for the transition. Schumpeter’s destructive engine of capitalism is about to show its ugly side.

Two powerful forces are currently driving energy markets and climate outcomes.

Fossil fuel prices are indeed opening the door to climate solutions, but not through the gradual carbon pricing mechanisms so favored by economists (and recently, reluctantly beginning to be explored by conservative thinkers). Instead, the divergence between clean energy price curves, which fall rapidly with market share and fossil fuel prices, which rise with consumption, are about to collide explosively.

Mike Huckabee goes where no Republican has gone before in using the Holocaust opportunistically. (Photo: DonkeyHotey)Just how far will a Republican Party presidential candidate go in criticizing President Obama and trying to grab a headline or two? To the edge of foolishness, senselessness, and recklessness ... but enough about Donald Trump! Over the weekend, however, former Arkansas governor trumped Trump with a tweet claiming that the Iranian nuclear deal was akin to "marching the Israelis to the door of the oven," an undisguised reference to the Holocaust.

Although roundly criticized by Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Huckabee spokeswoman maintained that Huckabee's statement was in line with his thinking that "the Iran deal is a bad deal, bad for America and bad for Israel."

In an interview with Breitbart News broadcast on Sirius/XM radio Saturday, Huckabee stated that, "He's [Obama] so naive he would trust the Iranians and he would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven."

"This president's foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians," Huckabee said. "By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people," he added.

"Whatever one's views of the nuclear agreement with Iran — and we have been critical of it, noting that there are serious unanswered questions that need to be addressed — comments such as those by Mike Huckabee suggesting the president is leading Israel to another Holocaust are completely out of line and unacceptable," said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in a statement.

Citizens of the US are being denied the right to know what they are feeding their families. Despite the fact that 90 percent of American citizens want GMO labeling on their food, big business is doing everything it can to prevent people from accessing their rights. Representative Pompeo’s bill, popularly known as the DARK Act (Denying Americans the Right to Know), has been written almost entirely by the biotech industry lobby. While American citizens are advocating for their rights to knowledge and healthy, affordable food, Monsanto’s legal team is busy on every legislative level trying to prevent this from happening.

Decades before there was a “debate” over GMOs and Monsanto’s PR and law firms became the busiest of bees, India was introduced to this corrupting, corporate giant that had no respect for the laws of the land. When this massive company did speak of laws, these laws had been framed, essentially, by their own lawyers.

Today, Indian cotton farmers are facing a genocide that has resulted in the death of at least 300,000 of their brothers and sisters between 1995 and 2013, averaging 14,462 per year (1995-2000) and 16,743 per year (2001-2011). This epidemic began in the cotton belt, in Maharashtra, where 53,818 farmers have taken their lives. Monsanto, on it’s own website, admits that pink bollworm “resistance [to Bt] is natural and expected” and that the resistance to Bt “posed a significant threat to the nearly 5 million farmers who were planting the product in India.” Eighty four percent of the farmer suicides have been attributed to Monsanto’s Bt Cotton, placing the corporation’s greed and lawlessness at the heart of India’s agrarian crisis.

Corporations have reaped trillion-dollar benefits from 60 years of public education in the U.S., but they're skipping out on the taxes meant to sustain the educational system. Children suffer from repeated school cutbacks. And parents subsidize the deadbeat corporations through increases in property taxes and sales taxes.

Big Companies Pay About a Third of their Required State Taxes

An earlier report noted that 25 of our nation's largest corporations paid combined 2013 state taxes at a rate of 2.4%, a little over a third of the average required tax. Many of these companies play one state against another, holding their home states hostage for tax breaks under the threat of bolting to other states.

Without Corporate Taxes, K-12 Public Education Keeps Getting Cut

Overall spending on K-12 public school students fell in 2011 for the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping records over three decades ago. The cuts have continued to the present day, with the majority of states spending less per student than before the 2008 recession.

Total corporate profits were about $1.8 trillion in 2013 (with other estimates somewhat higher or lower). The $46 billion in total corporate state income tax in 2013, as reported by both Ernst & Young (Table 3-A) and the Census Bureau, amounts to just 2.55% of the $1.8 trillion in corporate profits, a drop from the 3% paid in the five years ending in 2012.

Recently, Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, and Under Secretary Ted Mitchell held a conference call discussing the Department's plans for debt relief for Corinthian College students as well as to discuss holding other predatory schools accountable.

Some of these schools have brought the ethics of payday lending into higher education. They prey on the most vulnerable students, and leave them with debt that they too often can't repay. We must have accountability to protect both students and taxpayers.

Duncan is absolutely right. Many for-profit colleges promote themselves as career colleges, when in reality, they often leave students deep in debt, and without a degree. Corinthian is one example, but hardly the only culprit of this.

Just look at Globe University and the Minnesota School of Business (MSB). These two schools make up the bulk of the Globe Education Network, a family-owned chain of more than 30 for-profit colleges, which are often branded as "premier, family-managed system of career colleges, universities and training centers." Though they are marketed as being premiere, statistics paint a very different picture and often leave students worse off than before they enrolled. Both Globe University and MSB have high tuition, sky-high average student debt, high student loan default rates, poor graduation rates, and face numerous accusations of deception and high-pressure recruiting tactics.

This was Norman Mailer, four-plus decades ago, writing in Miami and the Siege of Chicago about the obsessive security measures – “helicopters riding overhead like roller coasters, state troopers with magnums on their hip and crash helmets, squad cars, motorcycles” – at the Democratic and Republican national conventions, which . . . uh, didn’t actually provide security, but sure allowed us to get even afterwards.

This is still the unnoticed insanity haunting the American news cycle, whether the story being reported is domestic or international. As a society, we’re armed and dangerous – and always at war, both collectively and individually. We’re endlessly declaring bad guys (officially and unofficially) and endlessly protecting ourselves from them, in the process guaranteeing that the violence continues. And the parallels between “them” and “us” are unnerving.

Mohammad Abdulazeez opened fire at a naval reserve training facility in Chattanooga and killed five people. He was suffering from depression and possibly radicalized by ISIS. Fox News headlined the story: “Tennessee gunman was armed to the teeth and ready for war with America.” The story pointed out that he was a naturalized American citizen born in Kuwait.